ApacheConEU - part 07

Julien Nioche shared some details on the nutch crawler. Being the mother of all Hadoop projects (as in Hadoop was born out of developments inside of nutch) the project has become rather quite with a steady stream of development in the recent past. Julien himself uses the nutch for gathering crawled data for several customer projects - feeding this data into an NLP pipeline based on Behemoth that glues Mahout, UIMA and Gate together.

The basic crawling steps including building the web graph, computing a link based ranking method and indexing are still the same since last I looked at the project - just that for indexing the project now uses solr instead of their own lucene based solution.

The main advantage of nutch is its pluggability: the protocol parser, html filter, url filter, url normaliser all can be exchanged against your own implementations.

In their 2.0 version they moved away from using their own plain hdfs storage to a table schema - mapped to the real database through Gora, an abstraction layer to connect to e.g. Cassandra or HBase. The schema itself is based on Avro but can be adopted to your needs. The advantages are obvious: Though still distributed this approach is much easier and simpler in terms of logic kept in nutch itself. Also it is easier to connect to the data for third parties - all you need is the schema as well as Gora. The current disadvantage lies in it's configuration overhead and instability compared to the old solution. Most likely at least the latter one will go away as version 2.0 stabelises.

In terms of future work the project focuses on stabilisation, synchronising features of version 1.x and 2.x (link ranking is only available in version 1.x while support for elastic search is only available in version 2.x). In terms of functionality the goal is to move to Solr Cloud, support sitemaps (as implemented by commons crawler), more (pluggable?) indexers.

The goal is to delegate implementations - it was already done for Tika and Solr. Most likely it will also happen for the fetcher, protocol handling, robots.txt handling, url normalisation and filtering, graph processing code and others.

The next talk in the Solr/Lucene talk dealt with scaling Solr to big data. The goal of the speaker was to index 100 million documents - the number of documents was expected to grow in the future. Being under heavy time pressure and having a bash wizard on the project they started building lots of their glue code and components in bash scripts: There were scripts for starting/stopping services, remote indexing, performance monitoring, content extraction, ingestion and deployment. Short term this was a very good idea - it allowed for fast iterations and learning. On the long run they slowly replaced their custom software with standard components (tika for content extraction, puppet for deployment etc.).

They quickly learnt to value property files in order to easily reconfigure the system even in production (relying heavily on bash xml was of course not an option). One problem this came in handy with was adjusting the sharding configuration - going from a simple random sharding to old vs new to monthly they could optimise the configuration to their load. What worked well for them was to separate JVM startup from Solr core startup - they would start with empty solrs and only point them to the data directories aafter verifying that the JVMs booted up correctly.

In terms of performance they learnt to go wide quickly - instead of spending hours on optimising their one huge box they ended up distributing their solrs to multiple separate machines.

In terms of ingestion pipelines: Theirs is currently based on an indexing directory convention, moving the indexing as soon as all data is ingested. The advantage here is the atomicity of mv that can be used - disadvantage is having to move around lots of data. Their goal is to go for hdfs for indexing soon and zookeeper for configuration handling.

In terms of testing: In contrast to having a dev-test-production environment their goal is to have an elastic compute cloud that can be adjusted accordingly. Though EC2 itstelf is very cost intensive, poses additional problems with firewalling and moving data their cloud computing could still be a solution - in particular given projects like cloud stack or open cloud. The goal would be to do cycle scavaging in their own datacenter, do heavy computations when there is not a lot of load on the system and turn those analysis of in case of incoming traffic.

When it comes to testing and monitoring changes they made good experiences with using JConsole (connecting it to several solrs at once through a simple ip discovery script) and solr meter as a performance debugging tool.

Some implementation details: They used Solr as some sort of NoSQL cache as well (for thousands of queries/s), push the schema definition to solr from the app, have common fields and the option for developers to add custom fields in the app. Their experience is to not do expensive stuff in solr but to move that outside - this applies in particular to content extraction. For storage they used an avro based binary file format (mainly in order to save storage space, have a versioned schema and fast compression and de-compression). They are starting to use tika as their pipeline and for auto content detection, scaling up with behemoth. They learnt to upgrade indexes without re-indexing using the lucene upgrade tooling. In addition they use Grimreaper to kill servers if anything goes wrong and restart it later.